It had all sounded very Jules Verne to me, along with a hint of something more sinister, people designed to be perfect in every conceivable way, each man an Übermensch. As far as I was concerned, the shadow of Frankenstein always hung over such grandiose schemes. And yet no one had ever spoken with more conviction than Mark about such a miraculous possibility, and I’d left our first meeting quite impressed with him, even hopeful that Diana had found her match.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I blurted before I could stop myself.

  Patty was clearly surprised by the question. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “I guess I just want you to have a normal life,” I said. “Husband. Kids.”

  Her answer was not at all what I expected.

  “That’s only normal for you, Dad,” she said. “It might not be normal for someone else.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe I should have said that I want you to be happy.” Rather than respond directly, Patty drew the picture of Diana from my hand. “What was she like?” she asked. “I mean, when she was my age. You’ve never really told me about that. Just that she read all the time. Could recite all this stuff. But what was she like … as a person?”

  “She was always standing off somewhere by herself,” I answered, remembering just how isolated she’d been even as a little girl, how often she’d stood apart from the other children. Time and again I’d urged her back into some kind of group play, my impulse always to make her less—the word hit me without warning—freakish. But it had rarely worked. She’d always retreated back to her solitude.

  Patty appeared to see all this. “So, she didn’t have any friends?”

  “No, she didn’t,” I answered.

  “She e-mailed me,” Patty said. “About Kinsetta Tabu. Which songs I like.

  What I think they mean.” She shrugged. “And other things.”

  “Other things?” I asked.

  Patty’s gaze suddenly turned wary. “I shouldn’t have told you about them,” she said. Her tone was unmistakably guarded. “It’s between Aunt Diana and me, anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s just that …” I stopped, unable to put my finger on what I found vaguely alarming about the correspondence.

  “You don’t like it,” Patty said. “That we’re talking.”

  I started to respond, but Patty abruptly stepped over to her desk. “It’s nothing to worry about, Dad,” she said. “I guess I can show you.” She reached into one of its drawers and pulled out a short stack of e-mails she’d printed. “She gives me things to think about, that’s all,” she said. “Questions for me to think about. It’s nothing terrible, so you don’t have to get all weird about it.” She drew the first e-mail from the stack and handed it to me. “Here, see for yourself.”

  I read the note, and as I read, heard Diana’s voice pronounce the words, What if the world were itself alive?

  What if the world were itself alive?

  Petrie studies the words he has written in his notes and you see the world he wishes to ensure. It is one in which clarity never dissolves and control never falters and we never find ourselves in a deep wood, alone.

  “Odd,” Petrie says, like one slowly opening a forbidden door just a crack before soundly closing it. “Questions like that. But would you call them dangerous?”

  You know that the end of the rope is not where Petrie grasps, the far spaces not where he looks.

  “No, not dangerous,” you agree. “If you can dismiss them.”

  “But they bother you?” Petrie asks. “Questions like that?”

  You are surprised that you have revealed this, the context in which you heard Diana’s question, the alarm it sounded deep within you, like a buried bell.

  “I didn’t want Patty exposed to them,” you tell Petrie. “Questions like that. I didn’t want her exposed to them the way Diana was … by her father.”

  “The professor:”

  “He was never a professor,” you correct him. “Except in his own mind. But he ran a school where he was the headmaster and Diana and I were the students. He ran it in our house on Victor Hugo Street. I stopped attending classes. I never graduated. You can think of it like that. But Diana kept going. She kept going, and it shaped her mind.”

  The nature of that mind returns to you, the way Diana’s initial ideas always became more focused as she closed in on whatever she was “researching” at the moment.

  “Or misshaped it,” you add. Petrie looks at you wonderingly.

  “She was full of quotations,” you explain. “Hundreds of them. It was easy for her to remember them, recall them. Some kind of photographic memory.”

  You know this is not enough, that it was more than Diana’s prodigious memory that had impressed and finally awed the Old Man.

  “Phrases were like whips on her back,” you add. “The psychology of fire. The heart of darkness. The shock of recognition. The power of blackness.”

  Petrie stares at you a moment, then, very slowly, slips down the knot of his tie.

  “It was passion,” you add fiercely. “It was intellectual passion that …” You feel the ground open up beneath you, a breath sucks you in, as if the earth really were a living thing, you the tiny creature it is devouring, “… that she couldn’t escape.”

  “But that didn’t make her dangerous,” Petrie says cautiously. “And certainly not murderous.”

  You think of the movie murderesses you’ve seen, Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, the chill they send down every male spine. Petrie is right, you admit. These are crazed women, stalkers, with murder on their minds, rejected women who in their rejection sought a terrible vengeance.

  “That’s true,” you tell Petrie. “Not a woman scorned. Not some horror- movie psycho.”

  “What then?”

  “Lonely,” you answer. “It made her lonely.”

  You see a shadow pass over Petrie’s face and realize just how powerful it is, the notion of loneliness, the deep ravine it carves.

  “I thought she had escaped it,” you add. “By having Jason. By loving him so much. And if he’d been normal …” You stop, amazed that for a moment, against all sense, you feel yourself blame a poor, dead child for being born, and being sick, and finally for drowning in a clear blue pond. “If he had lived …”

  “Yes?” Petrie asks.

  You think, Three deaths. Four deaths? Will it ever truly end? “If he had lived, I wouldn’t be telling you this story.”

  The blue pen holds as motionlessly as Petrie’s eyes. For a trembling instant, the world goes silent. Then he says, “Go on.”

  And so you do.

  SIX

  It was hard for me to imagine that Mark, during all his conversations with Bill Carnegie, hadn’t so much as mentioned Jason, and as I drove to work the morning after speaking with him, I went over the preceding years, how happy Diana had been when she’d gotten pregnant, and later given birth.

  But that first joy had faded as the weeks passed and she watched Jason ever more closely, sometimes writing her observations in a small notebook.

  Meticulously, she’d recorded a variety of common infant illnesses, earaches and colic, two bouts of pneumonia. By the time he was two, these illnesses appeared to have taken a toll on his overall stamina. He had a tendency to lie still for a long time, or slouch silently in his high chair, his hands in his lap, his dark eyes blinking slowly as if he were dropping off to sleep.

  “I’m worried, Davey,” Diana said to me one afternoon as we sat in the town park. “About Jason.”

  He was almost three years old that afternoon, sitting no more than ten feet away from us, his bare legs nestled in green summer grass. Other children were frolicking all about, but Jason paid them little mind. Instead, he kept his body rigid, facing the same direction, his attention focused, or so it seemed, on some point in the distance, a blinking light no one else could see.

  Diana continued to peer at Jason. “He doesn’t smile, Davey. He hardly ever cries.”

  I could see how troubled she was, and tried to ease her anxiety. “Diana, look, Jason’s probably just a little odd.” I smiled. “Maybe he’s a genius. Who knows? Einstein was odd, remember?”

  “Mark cares about that, but I don’t,” Diana said. “Cares about what?”

  “Whether Jason’s some kind of genius or not,” Diana said. “He’s like Dad in that way. That line from Schopenhauer, remember? The one he was always quoting.” Her voice suddenly sounded eerily like the Old Man’s: “‘Talent hits a target no one else can reach. Genius hits a target no one else can see.’”

  I looked at her, stunned. It was the first and only time Diana had ever betrayed the slightest sense that she regarded the Old Man’s furious intellectualism with anything but total admiration.

  She saw the shock on my face, noted the mute silence of my slightly parted lips, and looked away from me as if I’d suddenly flashed a bright light in her eyes.

  “Anyway, I hope you’re right about Jason,” she said. But I was wrong.

  Diana told me on a snowy December day. We were in the village square, amid the holiday whirl of lights and people hawking Christmas trees. She was buying presents for Mark and Jason, while I was looking for a video game for Patty.

  Jason had just turned four, his hand in Diana’s, though with little grip, as if he were merely a wooden toy dangling from his mother’s hand.

  We stopped in front of a particularly festive window. I remembered Diana’s face in the glass, her features superimposed over stacks of colorfully wrapped packages. Jason tugged his hand from hers and then, as if called by a voice, strolled over to a nearby parking meter.

  “Jason’s not okay,” Diana said very quietly.

  I glanced over to where Jason now stood beside the meter, his eyes fixed on its arc of numbers.

  “Mark thinks he’s schizophrenic,” Diana said. “But he’s only four,” I said.

  “It’s rare, but it happens,” Diana said. She fixed her eyes on the shop window. “It’s in the family, after all.” She looked at me. Her eyes were glistening. “We both know that, don’t we, Davey?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  She brushed at her eyes. “Mark will want to put him away,” she said in a sudden, vehement whisper. “I know that’s what he’ll want to do. But he can’t do it if I don’t sign the papers. And I won’t do that. Not ever.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “I’m going to take care of him.” She looked back into the brightly colored window. “As long as he lives,” she added. Her eyes flared visibly with the same quick and oddly violent flames that Mark had probably seen as well, the deep and scary part of my sister. “No one is going to take Jason. No one is going to get rid of him.”

  From that day until his death, Diana had never left Jason’s side, save for that one summer morning when Mark had decided to work at home rather than make his usual pilgrimage to the research center.

  I imagined the instant Diana must have first discovered that her son was missing. Moment to moment, like the separate frames of a film, I saw her pull into the driveway, remove the groceries from the back of the car, walk into the house, through the foyer and down the corridor to the kitchen with its large bay window. The sun was high, I knew that much, and so the pond must have been glittering brightly in the distance. At that point, I had no doubt that she would have put down her groceries and then, almost reflexively, begun to look for Jason. Living room. Den. One bedroom. Then another. Calling to him as she made her way through the ground-floor rooms and then up the stairs, listening to the tap of the keyboard as Mark worked in his small office at the far end of the corridor, wondering if Jason might be there with his father as she closed in upon that closed door, increasing her pace as she neared it, catching her breath as she turned the knob, the flickering movement of her eyes as they searched the tiny office where Mark sat, his gaze fixed on the monitor, until she said, “Jason.”

  What had she been thinking, I wondered now, as she stood in that door, faced that tiny room, with nothing but Mark in it, Jason’s name on her lips? Was it that she had failed, that for all her mighty effort, the purity and care of her motherhood, her son had, in fact, been gotten rid of?

  And how, sunk in the darkness of such a grave suspicion, could she ever be happy again?

  And yet, for all that, Diana didn’t seem unhappy when I ran into her a few days later. It was just after six and I was driving home when I saw her walking down Lancaster Street, her eyes cast downward as if following invisible tracks. She’d cut her hair so that it now fell just below her ears, and the blouse she wore had a distinctly military look, green, with dull metal buttons, something she’d no doubt purchased at the army-navy store a few blocks away.

  I guided the car over to the curb beside her and honked. She stopped, turned toward me, then walked over.

  “Need a ride?” I asked.

  “No, I’m headed back to the library,” Diana answered. I smiled. “Do you like working there?”

  “Very much.”

  I thought of Cheddar Man. “Still reading anthropology?”

  “Not exactly.”

  She appeared reluctant to tell me more about her reading or anything else, and so I didn’t press the issue. There had always been an intensely private aspect to her character, but on other occasions her secretiveness had been purely selfless, simply a way of protecting me from some hardship she felt no immediate need to share. She’d never told me why the Old Man had been suddenly seized and whisked off to Brigham when I was five. She’d also kept the Old Man’s final breakdown from me as long as she could before placing him, however briefly, in Brigham once again. She’d never spoken of her marriage, or of what she did with Jason all day, or the lonely nights she’d spent in the old stone farmhouse, waiting for Mark to come home from the lab.

  “So, how’s the new apartment working out?” I asked.

  Just fine, she told me, and for the next few minutes, she offered one of her customarily shaved-down descriptions. Her place wasn’t fancy, she said, but it was “functional.” Best of all, she added, it was set on a hill, and even though she had a ground-floor apartment, she could go up to the building’s rooftop terrace and from that height catch a distant glimpse of Dolphin Pond.

  Dolphin Pond … where Jason had drowned.

  “And way in the distance, I can see the rim of Dover Gorge,” she added.

  Dover Gorge was the place we’d explored as children, she gathering specimens for her botany collection, I merely strolling along beside her.

  “We should go there sometime, Davey,” she said now. “We could take a walk the way we used to.”

  There was hardly anything in my youth that I remembered more vividly than the walks Diana and I had taken together. I remembered the ones at Dover Gorge well enough, but it was the ones through our town that most often returned to me. By eight in the evening the Old Man was either immersed in a book or snoozing in his library chair. We would look in on him, assure ourselves that, in one way or another, he was out for the night, then quietly tiptoe down the short corridor, through the small, square living room, and then out into the night.

  Everything seemed better in the cool of evening, with just the two of us alone beneath the great overhanging oaks, sometimes walking hand in hand through the nearly deserted streets, then over to the campus quadrangle and up into the bell tower where we stood and looked out over the town.

  “There’s an overgrown path that leads to an interesting formation,” she added now. “Inside Dover Gorge, I mean.”

  “You’ve been there lately?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I read about it,” Diana answered. “This formation. We must have passed by it many times, but never noticed it.” She smiled. “We should go there again. Like old times.”

  “Anytime you say,” I assured her.

  She said nothing in response to this, and so an interval of silence followed, one I found uncomfortable and which gave a sense that she had embarked upon a secret mission she was unwilling to reveal. For a moment I envisioned her quite romantically as a movie spy, trotting down a rain-swept street, her body wrapped in a trench coat, the enemy’s invasion plans tucked beneath her arm, beachheads marked with red x‘s.

  “You look …” I stopped because I had no words for the way she looked, the hair that now hung boyishly at her ears, the urban guerrilla blouse. “Different,” I said finally.

  She made no response to this, but I sensed that my description had put her on alert in some indefinable way, and felt that the distance between us had widened, that we were like two astronauts, linked by a heavy cord that was now fraying, fiber by infinitely tenuous fiber, and that if it broke, we would drift out and out until we were finally no longer in the same universe. I was seized by an urgent need to reconnect to her, draw her back within the circle of our old intimacy.

  “You haven’t sent me anything else,” I said. “Like that picture you faxed me.

  Cheddar Man. It made quite a stir at my office.” She looked at me quizzically.

  “Charlie took it for a threat,” I added. “People do that sometimes. Like in the Godfather. That horse’s head in the guy’s bed. A little message. ‘Be careful. I know where you live.’ That sort of thing.”